There’s an eerie silence in the C-suites of America. Where business leaders once proudly proclaimed their commitment to democracy after Donald Trump’s cardinal assault on it three years ago, they’re now loath to say anything about the state of the nation, even as it stares down the barrel of a democratic backslide. Save for the Elon Musks and Mark Cubans of the world—who have made full-throated and, in Musk’s case, full-bodied declarations of presidential allegiance—many of America’s most formidable chief executives think it’s in their best interest to sit this election out.
The New York Times reports that Bill Gates, who could financially swallow whole countries if they were for sale, is too afraid to publicly endorse Kamala Harris, despite privately funding her campaign with the understanding that “this election is different.” Jamie Dimon, the notoriously outspoken CEO of JPMorgan Chase, is reportedly telling friends and associates that he supports Harris but won’t say so aloud for fear of reprisal. (Dimon’s spokesperson has maintained that he has “never publicly endorsed a presidential candidate.”) Warren Buffet, who openly backed Barack Obama in 2008 and Hillary Clinton in 2016, has refused to throw his weight behind either candidate this cycle. Business leaders aren’t “condemning” Trump, Cuban recently told Rachel Maddow, “because they’re worried about his retribution or his vengeance.”
In the tech world, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is also staying mum publicly, while privately telling Trump there’s “no way” he can support a Democrat. (That’s according to Trump, at least; a Meta spokesperson disputed the claim.) And on the media front, the
Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post, owned by billionaires Patrick Soon-Shiong and Jeff Bezos, respectively, each opted last week to not endorse Harris, an extraordinary, and ominous, break from editorial tradition that rattled staff and angered subscribers. Soon-Shiong took responsibility for the Times’ move, while Bezos has not directly commented. The Post, for one, reported that the decision was made by Bezos, while a Post spokesperson framed it as “a Washington Post decision.” (Vanity Fair has reached out to Bezos for comment.)
If you don’t particularly care about how billionaires signal political virtue, then their idleness might not concern you. But it should. Because chances are that every head of a Fortune 500 company is well-aware of the warnings that economists left, right, and center have been issuing for months now: That mass deportations, tariff hikes, and huge corporate tax cuts—to say nothing of the executive capture of the Federal Reserve—could immiserate America, tanking the dollar, spiking inflation, gutting employment, and sending national debt through the roof. “It is not hyperbolic at all,” as economist Kimberly Clausing told the Post, “to say this could cause a depression.”
Yet instead of guarding against this scenario by sounding the alarm, many corporate leaders have made the fiduciary equivalent of Pascal’s wager. They know that if Harris wins, the office of the presidency wouldn’t be weaponized against them—as has been the case under Joe Biden, who, despite his cri de coeur against shrinkflation and price gouging, has not been prone to singling corporations out. But when it comes to Trump, whose politics reside in personal grievance, business leaders have calculated that it’s safer to suffer the slings and arrows of neutrality if it means they might stay on the right side of his naughty-or-nice list. In polite terms, they’re engaging in what Timothy Snyder might call “anticipatory obedience.” In less academic argot, you might call it “cowardice.”
